Obama prosecutes torture whistleblower

(Sure, the Repugs are worse, but that doesn’t excuse Obama from prosecuting the whistleblowers but not the torturers. If this news is accurate — and I assume it is — it is sickening indeed. I want to be able to support him, but he makes it hard.)

GAP’s Radack: “CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou blew the whistle on ‘waterboarding’ and refused to engage in torture, but is the only person to be criminally prosecuted in connection with the Bush-era torture program”

(Washington, DC) – On April 3, 2012, the Obama administration indicted intelligence whistleblower John Kiriakou. Kiriakou is the sixth whistleblower that the Obama administration has charged under the Espionage Act for the alleged mishandling of classified information – more than all past administrations combined. In a rare move, the indictment was sealed until today.

Kiriakou is a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) veteran who headed counterterrorism operations in Pakistan after 9/11, organized the team operation that captured suspected al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah, and refused to be trained in torture interrogation tactics. In December 2007, Kiriakou gave an on-camera interview to ABC News in which he disclosed that Zubaydah was “waterboarded” and that “waterboarding” was torture. Kiriakou was one of the first CIA officers to label waterboarding as torture, and his interview helped expose the CIA’s torture program as policy, rather than the actions of a few rogue agents. Kiriakou further exposed the CIA’s torture program and the CIA’s deception about torture even to its own employees in his 2009 book, The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA’s War on Terror.

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